Saitoh, "Development of communication supporting device controlled by eye movements and voluntary eye blink," in 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEMBS), Hangzhou, China, 2004.
As a proxy for "tics," half of the participants of both groups were asked to deliberately eye blink when perceiving the puff or sound, by firmly squeezing both eyes.
The topics range from research on various eye conditions and disorders, to examinations of eye blink rate following sleep deprivation, gender-related differences during visual creative thinking, collaborative learning through argument visualization, and visual stereotypes in an eyewitness context.
With a typical eye blink duration of 0.1 to 0.4 seconds (let's use an average of 0.25 seconds) x 12-blinks per minute yields an average of three seconds out of every minute that our eyes are closed.
They used a startle probe presented at 2.5-, 3.0-, 3.5-, 4.0-, and 4.5-second intervals and measured the startle eye blink responses in the participants.